Biden attends Summit of the Americas, excludes Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico skips in protest

Anjali Sharma

GG News Bureau

WASHINGTON, 10^th June. President Joe Biden and the first lady Jill Biden on Wednesday arrived in Los Angeles to host the official opening ceremony for the summit at the L.A. Convention Center.

According to the White House officials, Biden will lead three days of meetings with leaders from North, South and Central America, as well as the Caribbean.

The group is expected to discuss global issues including ways to boost economic growth, address climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biden sought to assure the leaders of Latin American countries about his administration’s commitment to the region despite the concerns that Washington is facing at times with illegal immigration and migrants showing up at its border recently.

POTUS excluded Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, prompting Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and several other leaders to stay away in protest.

“There can be no Summit of the Americas if all the countries of the American continent do not participate,” López Obrador said Monday. “Or there can be, but we believe that means continuing of old politics of interventionism, of a lack of respect of their communities.”

Biden told a gala opening ceremony ON Wednesday “We have to invest in making sure our trade is sustainable and responsible in creating supply chains that are more resilient, more secure and more sustainable,”.

Biden is seeking to present Latin American countries with an alternative to China that called for increased U.S. economic engagement, including more investment and building on existing trade deals.

White House official said that “Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity,” which still appears to be a work in progress, stops short of offering tariff relief and, according to a senior administration official, will initially focus on “like-minded partners” that already have U.S. trade accords. Negotiations are expected to begin in early fall.

Vice President Kamala Harris delivered remarks at an event for the economic empowerment of women in Central America and the Western Hemisphere.

“Our collective expertise, resources and vision can and already has begun to create an echo system of opportunity,” Harris said.

Addressing the root causes of migration from Northern Central America is one of the issues President Biden has tasked the vice president with.

There are mixed reviews on her progress so far.

“It’s not all her fault,” said political analyst Hernan Molina.

Molina said Harris has not been as effective on the issue as the Biden Administration had hoped.
“She has had uneven responses from the countries,” he said.

“For instance, El Salvador has opted for clearly not meeting or not playing or partnering with United States.”

Molina attributes part of the problem to a historically more domestic approach to the topic.

“It has reinforced the idea in Latin America, that the United States looks to Latin America as that less than important neighbor, when in reality, it’s a huge market that has a lot of potential,” said Molina.

Some of the topics Molina is watching are the climate crisis, economic empowerment and safety.

“People in Honduras, people in El Salvador need to feel reassured and be able to live within their countries, not only subsist economically, but also to be able to raise their families without the threat of being assassinated,” Molina said.

Biden announced a proposed new U.S. economic partnership with Latin America aimed to counter China’s growing influence in the region as he kicked off a regional summit.

He outlined his plan as he launched the summit, which was conceived as a platform to showcase U.S. leadership in reviving Latin American economies and tackling record levels of irregular migration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Biden agenda has been undermined by the partial boycott by leaders upset at Washington’s decision to cut out its main leftist antagonists in the region.

Biden administration hope the summit and a parallel gathering of business executives can pave the way for greater cooperation as governments grappling with higher inflation work to bring supply chains stretched by the COVID-19 pandemic closer to home.

Biden used his speech to preview a summit declaration on migration to be rolled out on Friday, called it “a ground-breaking, integrated new approach” with shared responsibility across the hemisphere. But he provided few specifics.

He plans to revitalize the Inter-American Development Bank and create clean energy jobs.

Jake Sullivan said that Biden planned to announce a new commitment to IDB Invest, a private sector development finance arm of the bank.

The challenge from China is clearly a major consideration.

The data showed that China has widened the gap on the United States in trade terms in large parts of Latin America since Biden came into office in January 2021.

UN trade data from 2015-2021 showed that outside of Mexico, the top U.S. trade partner, China has overtaken the United States in Latin America and increased its advantage last year.

“The best antidote to China’s inroads in the region is to ensure that we are forwarding our own affirmative vision for the region economically,” Biden administration official said.

Biden’s aides have framed the summit as an opportunity for the United States to reassert its leadership in Latin America after years of comparative neglect under his predecessor Donald Trump.

Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters the choice by some leaders not to attend reflected their own “idiosyncratic decisions” and that substantive work would still be accomplished.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said the United States lacked “moral authority” to lecture on democracy and thanked Lopez Obrador for his “solidarity.”

The leaders of Guatemala and Honduras, two of the countries that send most migrants to the United States, also stayed away from the summit, raising questions about the significance of the coming joint migration declaration.

The leaders from 20 countries, including Canada, Brazil and Argentina, are attending the summit, hosted by the United States for the first time since its inaugural session in 1994.

Biden also met with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and discussed climate change and the topic of “open, transparent and democratic elections” in Brazil.

Bolsonaro, a populist admirer of Trump who has had chilly relations with Biden, has raised doubts about Brazil’s voting system, without providing evidence, ahead of October elections that opinion polls show him losing to leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols said the administration considered inviting the leaders, but ultimately ruled it out.

“Looking at the current situation in Cuba, in particular with trials of civil society leaders and similar situations in Nicaragua and Venezuela, we felt that the most appropriate decision was to maintain our own commitment to democracy and human rights in our hemisphere,” Nichols said.

Biden and the leaders are expected to sign a declaration on migration. The leaders of the three nations that account for much of the migration — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are also skipping the summit.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said “The leaders are not coming for each individual idiosyncratic reason none of which has to do with the migration issue.”

He said the countries are sending delegations of senior officials, and said the work of the summit would not be affected by the leaders’ absences.

To improve medical supply chains, addressing hunger and food shortages, and a climate and energy partnership with the Caribbean also on the agenda.

Biden will announce a new plan with partners in the region to recover from COVID-19 — and prepare for future pandemics. Working with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the plan includes training for 500,000 public health and medical workers in the region over the next five years, a program they’re calling the Americas Health Corps.

“At the end of the day people will see that we have taken a large number of concrete measures that will make people’s lives better,” said Nichols, who oversees policy in the Western Hemisphere at the U.S. State Department.

Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China, said the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, highlighted the United States’ own problems with upholding democracy. Those problems — the focus of a high-profile prime-time Congressional hearing in Washington on Thursday night — haven’t gone unnoticed in the hemisphere.

Guajardo said Latin American leaders, like others around the world, simply don’t know whether — or how long — the United States will be able to maintain its democratic principles of the past.

“It gives countries pause to say, ‘Why should we follow your lead?’ if we don’t know if your successor will leave us out to hang in the future,” Guajardo said.

According to the Congressional Research Service, China has made bigger inroads into the region’s economy, by investing over $138 billion into Latin America and the Caribbean since 2005.

Latin America has been looking for economic relief after the pandemic and getting little help from the United States, while China sits in wait — with an open checkbook.

Eric Farnsworth, a former State Department official now at the Council of the Americas said that the US needs to be more proactive to improve its standing in the region, and to make it attractive for Latin American leaders to engage,

“I’ve been saying this since at least last summer,” Farnsworth said. “You are heading for a train wreck unless you change course in some way and recognize that the hemisphere has shifted. But our policy in the region is simply status quo.”

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said the administration’s strategy is about more than just pouring money into “extractive projects,” like China does.

“The United States has never seen its comparative advantage in the world as just leveraging the hugest number of state dollars — but rather leveraging all the tools available to us,” Sullivan told reporters traveling with Biden.